For surety agents
You're underwriting on a schedule you have to take on faith
Most contractor WIP schedules are built once a year, by hand, weeks after you asked, by someone who does it once a year. You read it knowing the estimates at completion may not have moved since the job started.
When we're on the account, the schedule is current every month.
What changes
The schedule stops being an annual reconstruction
Retainage broken out by contract
Receivable and payable, instead of sitting in receivables looking collectible.
Underbillings identified rather than buried
Work performed and not billed is real earned revenue. Presented properly it supports working capital. Presented poorly it doesn't exist for your purposes.
Estimates at completion that move
Cost-to-cost percent complete recalculated monthly against actual job cost, not carried forward from the bid.
Backlog reported alongside working capital
In the format you're going to ask for anyway.
Fewer follow-up questions
The package includes the schedule, the roll-forward showing what moved and why, and the supporting job cost detail.
The first submission
The ones who have never produced a schedule at all
A different account from the one above. A subcontractor comes to you because a general contractor asked him to bond a job he wants, and he has never been asked for any of this before. His books were built to produce a tax return.
There is no WIP schedule, not a stale one
Nothing to update and nothing to correct. It gets built from the contracts and the job cost history, and the first one is the one that takes time.
The books are on a cash basis
Which is the right answer for his return and the wrong one for your underwriter. Accrual gets maintained alongside it rather than replacing it.
Retainage is sitting inside receivables
Looking collectible and inflating current assets. Aged out by contract, receivable and payable, working capital reads as what it actually is.
The chart of accounts was built for a tax form
Not for job reporting, which is true of most inherited contractor books. Rebuilding it is the precondition for everything above rather than tidying, and it is the reason a first submission runs on a longer clock than a correction.
These usually take a season rather than a month, and it is worth knowing which kind of account you are looking at before you promise him anything.
Where the line is
What we don't do
We don't place bonds, we don't have a view on which surety should write the account, and we're not building toward either. Refer freely.
Before you spend your credibility
What we tell you
If a referred contractor's books can't support a defensible WIP schedule, you hear that from us before you've spent your credibility on it. The first ninety days on a messy book is cleanup, not insight, and we'd rather set that expectation with you than have it surprise your client.
The return
Why it's worth your time
A contractor whose numbers hold up between renewals is a contractor you can place, re-place, and grow capacity for. Clean records make an account marketable. Messy ones get quoted defensively or declined.
Who we are
Tom Woolley, Founder
Today CFO is a construction financial operations and advisory firm in Houston serving commercial contractors nationally. We are not a CPA firm and we perform no attest work.
Tom Woolley founded the firm after a prior software company exit. Before that he spent nearly six years at Nabors Industries, running job costing and logistics for construction. He traveled internationally to monitor builds, vendor supply chains, inventory, and job profitability in the field.
He holds an MBA rather than a CPA, and the orientation is deliberate: an operator's practice built around the finance function, not a compliance practice that added advisory later. Attest work goes to a CPA firm. Returns are reviewed and signed by credentialed preparers.
Most of our construction clients are commercial contractors. Not construction adjacent, not residential remodelers.
We run the whole function remotely from Houston. Job costing, field receipt capture, accounts payable through Bill.com, and the subcontractor documentation an insurance audit asks for.
We work in QuickBooks Online and Xero, and rebuild the chart of accounts for job-level reporting when it isn't already.
Talk to us about an account
If you have a contractor in mind, the useful first call is with you rather than with him. Tell us what the submission is missing and we can be specific instead of starting from a blank page.
Talk to us about an account